Hi,
We need to determine a little more info about your iMac.
When you click About this Mac in the upper left main menu bar, a popup window appears.
In this window is a More Info button. Click this button.
Look for the Mac model number indentifier (my model ID for my iMac is 10,1)
I believe that your iMac maybe starved for RAM.
1 GB of RAM is a very bare minimum for running any version of Mac OS X.
Esspecially low RAM for Intel versions of OS X.
We need to determine what year and model iMac you have so we can recommend increasing the RAM amount to amount your model iMac can take.
If you have a lot of documents and folders on your desktop, you will need to take the time to organize these an minimize the amount of items on the desktop. If you have actual folders and documents sitting on the desktop, these could be causing slowdowns on the desktop because your iMac has to process all of these all the time because they are always present on the desktop.
When you first open mail, the amount of messages are located at the top of the window.
If you want to know the data size amount, in the left hand panel, you click once on the any of folders and use the key combination Command-I.
Apple Mail allots 15 GBs total to the Mail application for saving mail.
You may need to go through all of your mail and start thinning out deleting no longer needed emails. Go through your Inoboxes, sent mail and Junk Mail to delete unwanted emails.
Also, make sure you empty the trash in the Mail app, too!
Another thing, make sure you have actually emptied the OS X Trash icon in the OS X dock and just not put things in the Trash icon. If there is a paper full look to the OS X Trash icon, then you need to actually empty the OS X Trash.